Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“What are you thinking?” she said.

“That you are beautiful.”

She turned away from him.

“There is a walk down here,” she said, and stepped ahead.

She was still not sure why she had come, why she had invited him, or where one moment would lead the next. Gabriella Castoldi had abandoned the fantasy of true love; the rigour and perfectionism of her character, which had been gifted her by her father (a man whose ceaseless but muted anger at the world had found expression only in the three warts that ran in a line on the left side of his forehead), meant that she could not envision happiness for herself longer than an instant. So, as she stood by the river's edge in the late evening, where the falling fog smelled of the mountains, she did not think of love; she did not imagine that the awkward man with the long arms and bare head could have a long and lasting role in her life. She considered none of this. She was there with him simply because of the way he was, because of how he had listened to the music, because of that quality of intensity and seriousness in the white puzzle of his face that suggested a dumbfounded amazement and wonder at the same time as the long-suffering knowledge of woe.

Gabriella walked ahead of him down the gravelled path by the river. She heard his footsteps crunching unevenly behind her. It was dark and drizzling. They had moved beyond the reflected light of the floodlit waterfall into a place where the pine trees grew thickly and the scent of the night air was held low upon them by the overhanging branches. Gabriella stopped and Stephen came close to her.

“Shush. Listen,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

Nothing. Stillness. Their breaths slowed until the entangled sounds of the woods and the water rose like raised volume, those soft crashings and whisperings that were the life of the night, revealed and shared like a secret.

“I love this,” she said. “This is why I like to stay here, in Kenmare. In the mountains.”

They stood a time with nothing to say.

“The world is simple here, isn't it?” Gabriella said at last. She looked into the darkness of the river flowing past the trees. She looked at the outpouring and onrushing river that was the river of her own life and felt its sadness teem; here was her childhood in Venice, firstborn of the policeman Giovanni and Christa Castoldi, the child of their earliest loving, upon whom fell the unsaid yet subtly broadcast disappointment that she was not a son, and whom her father, Giovanni, could not hold for more than five minutes without passing her back like a strange fish netted in the murk of the lagoon; her mother, who was always pregnant and miscarrying, who passed to Gabriella the understanding that girls clean and cook, and who made her from age six the second in command of the narrow brown rooms of the house in the Calle Visciga, where already her two brothers were lords; how her duties mounted, and how frequently she stayed in the kitchen with the caged bird that did not sing to prepare the meals which might garner love in her returning father's quick praise as he gorged himself closer to death; how she had heard the violin teacher Scaramuzza when he moved into the apartment below them and managed to persuade her mother to let her take lessons; how there, too, was reinforced the already solidifying belief that nothing she could do would ever be good enough, and that the brutal music she made was a sorry and discordant insult to its composers; and yet how she had continued, playing only when her parents were out of the house, and then, when her mother, after six miscarriages, was taken to bed with the early stages of liver failure, gradually daring to bow the notes in diminuendo in the farthest room; how she had become the mother then, years before she had been a lover or known anything but the dreamt caresses that visited her sleep like the princes of fairy tales; the years of her father's pent-up and brooded-upon horror as his sons became vivid and frightful mockeries of his once most cherished machismo fantasy of the Castoldi boys, who were to be policemen like their father, cleansing the plaguey corruption that soured the air of Venice like grey spores, but who became instead the very same small villains with open shirts and silver chains whom he spent his life jailing; how Giovanni Castoldi did not get to retire, but whose spleen had ruptured and exploded inside him with hot rage in the police motor launch on the Canal Grande when he found himself chasing the slippery and evil shadow of himself that was Antonio Castoldi, who had fired three shots at the man he did not know was his father before crashing at full speed into the vaporetto station at the Ponte Accademia; how the music had taken over then for Gabriella; how the violin had become her father and her mother and her family; and how even Scaramuzza had admitted her progress, scratching the dryness of his right ear and clearing the wet cloud of his chest phlegm to acknowledge her with the single word bene; the years of her university then and the approach of those not yet men who saw in the cool remoteness of her playing something to be conquered, a woman too much in her own kingdom who they imagined needed bringing into the tight prisons of their smaller passions, and whose fumbling and filmy-sweated version of love left Gabriella Castoldi feeling there were no emotions as pure as those she played in the music; and then the poet Pollini, who arrived in her life with the surprising abruptness of grace, when beneath her eyes was already the colour of pale plums; the season of that happiness that then like everything else fell down and withered. And left her there in Kenmare.

She saw it in the night river. She saw it and felt the grief and loneliness of her world grow immense and cold inside her. She stood motionless, and Stephen stood behind her. There were no stars. The mountain fog lay on the treetops. Thin veils descended wetting their hair. Gabriella turned around.

“I don't know your name,” she said.

When he told her, she nodded, as if the sounds of it revealed something that she had already known.

“Stefano,” she said. “Hold me.”

Early the following morning Gabriella lay on the bed with the covers half across her and her feet hanging over in the cool air. She was midway between waking and sleep, and lingered in that warm place where time slows and holds still the not quite vanished dreamlike quality of the night. She was lying on her back and her hair fell to the right across the pillow. She kept her eyes closed and held behind them the astonished and rapturous kisses of the night, the white tremoring of Stephens body when he was undressed, and his loving that was first infinitely hesitant and slow, each touch like a terrifying adventure — this place on her bow arm, this firmness in her neck where her violin fit and where his mouth tasted her — until, in the clockless time of two bodies learning each other like a language, he had loved her more wildly, and they had rolled back and across the bedclothes in each other's held embrace, in a way that had sometimes seemed as if from the unseen and enormous tide of loss, grief, and despair, each was rescuing the other.

Gabriella was not in love. She was not ill or delirious for his presence, she did not feel she needed him to be able to get out of the bed and imagined she could live through the day without seeing him and have no balloon of longing inflate in her chest. She had nothing of the schoolgirl's flushed excitement and ran no fever. But the emotion she felt for Stephen Griffin was the baffled and uncertain beginnings of love nonetheless.

She lay in the bed and listened to the sounds of morning. Stephen had gone to the shops for milk for her coffee. When he returned with the milk and two punnets of strawberries, he entered her cottage with the deep hesitation of a man unsure if this was the place where he had left a dream. She stirred in the bedclothes, and he went to her kitchen, opening her presses like privacies and finding that she drank no tea, only coffee from grounds. He looked at the cups she had, at her sugar bowl and milk jug. He ran his hands on the countertop, as if fingering a hidden keyboard where there played the music of all her time there in Kenmare. He looked at everything that was hers, and then made a muddy coffee without a paper filter, carrying it in to her bedside and then sitting down in the chair beside the window like a visiting uncle, with his hands on his knees.